Resource Sample for Our Special Needs Parent Resource
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When Your Child Continues to Struggle:
What You Need to Know
If your child has consistently experienced difficulty with learning and schoolwork, you may be wondering if you are doing something wrong. You may even have asked yourself whether the child needs a different teacher or whether your child might be a “slow learner.” Perhaps you’ve wondered whether you are teaching with the right “learning style.”
All of these are appropriate concerns, but let me offer some reassurance! After helping hundreds of homeschool families, I’ve seldom found a parent to be the primary cause for a child’s learning struggles! The child may have learning disabilities, but there are countless other factors that interact to affect educational and social development: diet, environmental toxins, allergies, emotional issues, and/or immaturity.
Just to be on the safe side, you should check whether you are using the most effective approaches for instruction. For example:
- Do you review prior material before you introduce new skills?
- Do you provide specific feedback, clearly stating both what was done well and what the child should improve?
- When your child becomes “stuck,” do you stop to analyze the task or consider that he lacks pre-skills?
- If you are using effective teaching strategies, what else might be causing the problem?
Here is another possibility: your child may be curriculum disabled! His struggle may be due to poor curriculum design or inadequate teaching materials! Not all books and materials marketed to homeschool families are well designed or logically organized. Some texts don’t even teach the foundational skills your child needs to move ahead. Ask yourself: does your child’s textbook present information in a well-sequenced way? Does it jump from topic to topic? Maybe the math or vocabulary books overemphasize drills or don’t provide adequate practice. Remember, too, that even if a particular program worked splendidly for one of your children, that program could be a cause of some problems for another one. If so, consider trying a different curriculum or program. (Visit my website—www.helpinschool.net—to find out more about choosing a curriculum that is appropriate for your child.)
IF YOU’VE checked both your teaching and the curriculum, but you do not have the answers you need, then it’s time to look within your child. Let’s start with basic physical factors that impact learning: vision and hearing. Have you had them checked? In order to do school work, your child needs good vision. Your child may need corrective eyeglasses, but not all vision problems arise from poor acuity. Occasionally, reading delays have been linked to weak visual tracking. Practitioners know that students with dyslexia complain of fuzzy text, shifting letters, and other visual irregularities—even with 20/20 eyesight. You need to know that the most significant reading problems arise from deficits in how the brain processes sound-to-symbol relationships.
